How Genre Affects Your Story

Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, I have some questions about genre, what genre I'm writing in and how that will affect my overall story. So Sean and I dive into this and if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know Sean believes genre is extremely important. It gives you the conventions and obligatory scenes that your story needs to hit. And I was just getting a little confused about what that meant for my story, as I'm sure you have felt about your story from time to time. So I think it's a great episode. I hope you enjoy it. Let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, a few weeks ago, a month ago, something I was talking with a buddy of mine and I was kind of bragging, you know, I'm like, you know, I'm to the point where Sean, he doesn't just let me write one scene, he'll let me write a whole sequence before he'll look at it and give me feedback. And literally like the next day we recorded and you made me stop writing.

Entirely. Right. As we like figured out how to do a middle build. So it's been nice to have this plan in place and I'm moving. I've got four scenes done since we taught. My first sequence actually expanded out to four scenes because I found this great opportunity as I was writing to stop and explain the world through the eyes of one of the characters. Which was kind of neat. Yeah. So I've been writing on that. I'm gonna try to get the first two sequences done. So, you know, roughly seven scenes done before you look at it. So I'm going to get that to you probably next week. But I've been thinking I want to step back since I'm not ready to go over the writing yet. And just I had some questions around genre. And this is kind of based on some of the emails you and I have been passing around from one of our listeners about the lit RPG genre. And I'm struggling a little bit with how to think about like, because we keep saying, okay, we're writing a coming of age thriller. And so because of that it has these certain kind of scenes we've got ahead and you know, obligatory scenes, conventions and all that. But then when we layer in like a lit RPG that doesn't seem to be its own genre, that's almost kind of like a different set. Anyway, I'm curious how you think about these things because, you know, like, I don't think you lay out in your book, like, here's the sci fi genre and here's what has to be in your sci fi book, because sci fi is not really one of your genres. It's more like, okay, are you writing a war story? Are you writing a thriller, Are you writing an action story, a love story? So how do you kind of think about, you know, especially these new genres, like a lit RPG is a newer genre that's popping up. You know, how do you think about how these things fit together? Because I'm a little lost on it.

Okay, good questions and I'm glad you brought it up because somebody had sent me an email about how I was classifying young adult fiction as a genre instead of a market. If I said that YA was a genre, it was probably I was just speaking too quickly. But young adult stuff is a market, meaning it's a put upon idea from publishers that just divides books depending upon the age of the reader. It really has nothing to do with genre classifications in general. It's a marketplace. And the other question that they said was that there are plenty of YA books where the pivotal moment and the pivotal story is not dependent upon coming of age. Yes, that is true too, just as there are action adventure novels that don't have any internal component whatsoever. So you know that great sort of video that we talked about a couple of weeks ago where they did explain Star wars and the internal and external movements, using that terrific television writer's concepts was good, because what happens with genre, and obviously you're going through this now, is that we can get so deeply overwhelmed by all of the different conventions, obligatory scenes, etc. Etc. But to answer your question specifically, LITRPG is literature that concerns role playing games within the story itself. That's what LITRPG stands for. I think so. At least that's the way I view it.

Yeah, that's right. Okay, so role playing games, RPGs.

Yeah. Okay. So that as a genre is a new sort of thing. And what I mean by that is that there are no Amazon classifications as of yet that determine that something's litrpg. It's a movement among fans of stories that feature games inside of a larger story. So LitRPG has very few requirements. Essentially the requirements are that there are. There's a game involved, usually a virtual reality game, where somebody goes into a mystical world that is digitally driven, be it a game world or the Matrix. And there are two realities. There's the reality in the game and there's reality reality. So that's one thing. The other thing is that there has to be different levels inside of the game, meaning that the player has to progress inside the world from one hierarchy to another. So that's another convention of it. And then there are other minor conventions that are to be found. I think there's a Facebook group that's dedicated to LitRPG. I think there's a lot of people who are now putting LITRPG in their subtitles for their books so that the Amazon readers will find them. I think if you go to Goodreads, there's a LITRPG section. This is for everybody who's interested in it. But what LITRPG is, it's one component which one element in the five genre clover. And you can go to storygrid.com and look at the genre clover. And where it belongs is in the reality clover. It's one of the petals on the clover, and it's in the reality section. And the reality section has, you know, four major kinds of reality. There's trying to find my book because even I forget this stuff sometimes. Hold on a second.

Yeah, I'm pulling it up, too. Page 55.

Okay. There is factualism. And what factualism is are stories based upon historical fact? They're based on them. And it feels as if the story is almost a documentary feel. There's a movie out now about Jacqueline Onassis that uses that sensibility. Also Forrest Gump, if you remember that movie. They put a lot of documentary footage within that larger story to give it a feeling of factualism. Factualism plays as if we're watching truth. Truthful events that happened that are moving forward in a factual way. So it doesn't mean that it's true, but it means as it feels, the reality feels as if it's facts. So when Steven Spielberg made the movie Lincoln, he made that feel factual. So the look of the set, the performances, all felt as if we were stepping back in time and seeing what the world was like in the United States during the Civil War. And we were inside the Oval Office with Abraham Lincoln. It's a terrific movie. Okay, so that's one part of the reality genre pedal on the clover factualism. The second one is realism. And what realism is are stories that feel as if they could be real, but they're made up. You know, a couple years ago there were these movies made about this drug dealer in New York City. I think it was. I forgot what it was called. But, you know, during. Oh, Steve Pressfield has a new novel out, and it's called the Knowledge. And. And so the Knowledge is set in 1970s New York, and all of the things that happen in the novel feel real. All of the particular streets that he talks about are real streets. The restaurants he talks about are real restaurants from that era. You know, Steve came back to New York and did, you know, four or five days of hunting down all of the specific details so that the realism of his story, true to life. And it's a wonderful story. I edited it. So, you know, take that for what you will. But it's a. It's a wonderful sort of like a big Lebowski esque crime story, which it's like half Philip Broth, half, you know, Coen Brothers. It's terrific. Anyway, so that's realism. It's when you create a story and you pack on the details that make it feel that it could have happened. But, you know, it's not factualism. The third one is absurdism. And absurdism means that it's just a crazy, mixed up world that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Jean Luc Godard made great absurdist movies, and if you love that kind of thing, Godard is your guy. I mean, I think he made only two or three realistic films, and everything else was sort of. He made one movie where there's this scene where this contemporary couple is walking in the woods, and all of a sudden Jane Austen comes up and starts having conversation with him like the real Jane Austen. So it's an absurdity where Jane Austen would come back and talk to somebody in the woods and another absurdist person was waiting for Godot, that famous play by Samuel Beckett. And pretty much all of Beckett's works were absurdist dramas. And I write about this in the story. But absurdism came out of World War II and just. It made no sense that the world was the way it was. So absurdist dramatists came on board. It's not a very popular genre. It's not a very popular reality that people love anymore. So my advice is to steer clear of absurdism. Now, the last One is where LitRPG falls, and that is the fantasy division of the reality. And fantasy is. It's a very strict set of rules of mystical other worlds in which people inhabit. Like Lord of the Rings is a great Example of a fantasy world that is completely believable. It has its own rules. There's magic, there's all kinds of different things that occur in that world. But we know that world has very specific rules.

And so you put science fiction inside of fantasy as well as like a sub genre of fantasy.

I did.

And so fantasy is basically. So we have factualism which is basically a true story. Realism which is a could be true story because it's based in the real world. And then you basically have. The other two are basically stuff that doesn't exist in the real world. One makes sense which is fantasy and one doesn't make sense, which is absurdism.

That's correct. Absurdism is driven by chaotic unfathomable things happening. There aren't really any rules. And fantasy has very strict rule base. Now science fiction differs from sort of your Lord of the Rings kind of stuff where the magic is science based, meaning that science fiction uses extrapolations of scientific possibility to their furthest place. For example, Jurassic park, that's science fiction because it's based upon genetics. It's based upon current research that has to do with DNA. But what it does is it takes a leap forward and it says what if this science we were able to clone dinosaurs from old DNA, what would happen then? And so that is a story, science fiction based upon real science, hard science. Now there's other science fiction that's based on sort of what they call soft science or magical kind of scientific thinking. Basically it's, it's a made up idea that doesn't make any sense, but people go with it.

But it still creates a set of rules.

Yes.

So like you have Star Trek listed as an example and it's like there's still a set of rules that runs the Star Trek universe. I mean they're not like real world rules, but that doesn't mean like all of a sudden they can breathe in space, you know, or something, you know, like they've set rules that they're following inside of the book.

Exactly, exactly. So.

Or inside the world that's created.

I mean there are books that are written called the Science of Star Trek, which explores the fictional universe of Star Trek and how it mirrors possible futuristic things in our own world. So science fiction in that way is very much driven on realistic science based ideas. Now LitRPG is kind of interesting and there's a reason why genres evolve at particular times in the universe. And I mentioned earlier why absurdism came about because it was right after the bloodiest, most craziest time, which Made no sense. An entire country of people seemingly lost their minds and perpetrated such evil that it made no sense anymore and millions of people lost their lives. Made no sense. So based upon that reality that things just don't make any sense anymore, dramatists and writers reacted to the culture and to the reality of history at the time and evolved a new art form that was an intellectual statement of that fact. The world is unfathomable and it's absurd, so get used to it. So waiting for Godot was, you know, it's one of the primary plays in the. Of the 20th century, is about two guys who are waiting for somebody who never shows up. And Godot is, you know, the not too subtle, you know, term for God. Anyway, so LITRPG is interesting to me because it's evolving as a genre right now. And what's interesting is I would put it in the fantasy arena, but it's almost this, this hybrid of soft science fiction. No, actually hard science fiction and fantasy because the fictional world in the game itself comes from the imagination of the writer who has to place himself or herself from the point of view of a game developer. So it's this very meta idea where the game developer as novelist. So why would you write a novel about a game when the very things that make you write a believable world could be transferred into becoming a game maker? So it's a very meta idea where novelists are creating false games in the fictional reality in order to make a statement of some sort. So LITRPG is interesting because also to me, it's evolving now when more and more people are playing more and more of these games. So if more and more of these people are playing more and more of these games, why do they have the time to read a novel about it? Why are they reading novels about it? Because in my opinion, the experience reaches a place of almost absurdity to the people who are playing the games. And you and I talk about this a lot, about time management. I know you're. You've played games in your past, and I certainly have. But the thing that you slowly come to realize when you become addicted to a video game, there comes a place. It's almost like learning how to play golf. There comes a place where you realize I am spending so much time doing something that has absolutely no meaning. What am I doing? This? Why am I doing this? And I think that that place is coming for the game.

You just made like all the people that play golf really upset.

Our listenership just dropped.

Well, the thing with Golf is that you come to a point, and I came to this point sooner than most people do when you realize I'm never going to get good. I'm just never going to get. I'm never going to shoot better than 80, you know, that's going to be my best. And then you realize I'm spending 16 hours a weekend playing golf and I don't know anything else. That's all I do. What's interesting to me about LitRPG is that it's this underground movement of people who are probably gamers themselves who are going to these novels. Because novels have meaning, you know, embedded inside of them. There's a story. And for you, you have a coming of age story and a thriller which is about the hero rising in defense of the greater good. So those two messages of, you know, seeing the world in a different way, changing your worldview, and the heroic message of sacrificing yourself for the greater good are messages that lit RPG readers are really attached to. So I think it's an up and coming genre that will really, you know, get larger and larger and larger. And I think a lot of the people who read Hunger Games and Harry Potter, these are gamers too. I kind of forget your original question. Other than the LITRPG is part of fantasy, which is part of the reality pedal on the Five Leaf Clover overall genre.

So I guess I worry. Well, my biggest worry right now is that the main LITRPG novel, the most well known, is Ready Player One. And a vast majority of that book takes place in the digital world. Same thing with Matrix, where like my book is shaping up to be, where only a small part is actually played inside of the game and, you know, we could throw this in the bucket of things I worry about that don't matter, which is getting full at this point. But, you know, so if I say, well, that's what I'm trying to write, but yet I'm not really don't seem to be hitting any of the markers of a lit rpg. I mean, does that matter? It just is like, okay, well, you didn't write litrpg, you're still writing a coming of age thriller, which is really all you need to know.

LITRPG in my estimation is similar to. There was a big movement in books a while ago where it was me and Marley. There were all these books about dogs and there were nonfiction books and there are fiction books and there are all kinds of things. And each one of those books was different, but they all shared one thing. They had a dog in the book. In my estimation, LitRPG is an evolving genre that does not have strict conventions and obligatory scenes yet it is not part of the content genre. So it's sort of the. I don't mean to denigrate it in any way, but it's sort of the, the setting element. It's sort of the window dressing. And you know, I would say that this first novel that you're writing, and we've talked about this since you started writing, is that you plan on making this a much larger story than one novel. So the first novel is an important place to establish character. So for your character to be spending all her time inside this magical world, this lit RPG world, at the very start of the story, I think would be too distracting because you have to remember your content. Your content is the thing that you need to focus on. Make sure that you're hitting those points. So the global story here is a revelation coming of age plot where your lead character moves away from naivete to knowingness of the world. She gets a worldview shift from thinking the world is one way and ending up seeing it another way. So that's the global coming of age movement. The thriller movement is the external genre where the action is going forward, straightforward. So in that genre, she is absolutely moving on. The thriller arc, the beginning hook gets her to a place where she has to understand that if she does not accept the call, she's going to hurt other people. So reluctantly she decides to accept the call and fears she'll just go through this program as quickly as she can and then go back home. Then maybe everything will be okay eventually. You are not betraying the LITRPG genre conventions because they aren't firmly established yet. And the worst thing that's going to happen is that people who love LITRPG will read the book and say, hey, pretty good book. I wish there were more time in the game world though. And if I get. If you hit the thriller, well, they will forgive you for not having ready Player 1's in depth game life in it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes sense. The question I'm getting at is like we talk so much about genre because you're like, once you know your genre, it answers all these other questions for you, right? And so I guess what I'm worried about is you've probably already answered this, but I want to get at my struggle with this question that I think other writers probably struggle with, which is like, okay, if I'm still kind of unsure on the whole lit RPG thing, what questions am I missing questions I should have answers to. Because you're like, you've got to know the genre so that you know all this other stuff so you know what points to hit. Because if you're writing a war story, you have to hit different moments than if you're writing a thriller or whatever. And so if I am super squishy on the lit RPG thing, it's okay because you're like, that doesn't matter as much because you've got your external and internal, your thriller, you've got the content genres picked and that's what's giving you the information you need. The setting is just, again, like you said, not like denigrating it, but you're basically the window dressing. Right. Because bad science fiction books are the ones that it's more about the science fiction than it is about the story.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Let me say this. As a writer or as an artist, there are some fundamental decisions that you make as a creative person without even really thinking about it. What do I mean by that? Okay, there are, as you said, science fiction stories that all they are about is the spaceship on the COVID So there isn't any global arc of character movement. There is no coming of age element. It's a shift. It's abandoned in space. It has to find its way home. Go. That's the entire story. Will they get home or won't they get home? The Martian is a great example of a story where the character does not change and the whole story is externally driven by the content. And the science fiction element is really the exciting stuff that keeps the viewer and the reader's interest going beyond.

You could like lift that entire book and put it on the bottom of the ocean and have the same book.

Yeah. And I'm sure somebody who's probably making that note right now and will probably do that. But the thing that made Andy Weir's book so great is Andy Weir is a space nerd. So he, you know, he wanted to write a story about a thing that he adored, which is space life and all of the what ifs of what would happen if you had space. Somebody who lived on Mars, how would it work? So he figured all that stuff out. And because it was so fascinating to him, he wrote the book. He didn't think anybody was going to like this thing beyond himself. And he really got into the details, well, how would I grow my own food on Mars? How would I solve that problem? So that book is a series of solving scientific problems from the point of view of Mark, who's the lead character. But even so, that's an example of a guy who writes a very, very strict genre book. He's not out to, you know, have some wild worldview point of view shift from his lead character who discovers something terrible has happened and he changes the way he sees the universe and he's able to capable of loving again. He wasn't trying to do what they did in Gravity, which was not very successful, in my opinion, where the female lead character, Sandra Bullock, you know, she's in this moment. Is she gonna get back to Earth? Is the big question in Gravity. But the filmmakers thought that might not be enough, so they threw in this thing about midpoint where she has this moment of crisis where she tries to decide whether to kill herself or not and whether the life is worth living. And to me, it always felt hollow because we didn't need that. We just needed that action of her desperately trying to get back to Earth. We didn't need any, you know, deep dark recesses of her inner motivation. And that was wisely. The decision Andy Weir made too, was when you have an extremely deeply researched and compelling external setting, like a guy on Mars or a woman stuck in space, go with your strength. Don't necessarily need the coming of age owners. Now, when you came to me and said, I want to write a book kind of like Harry Potter, which features the growth of, you know, a younger person who, you know, learns certain lessons, and by the end of this whole thing, I want her to have a, you know, a very strong sense of the world, et cetera, I thought, okay, he wants to write a coming of age story. And then we came up with the thriller plot. The apple that you wanted to bite was pretty large, and I didn't discourage you from biting that big chunk of apple because I believe that people want to write something and the reasons why they want to write them are none of my business, but that I need to help them fight that white whale and figure out what it is that they needed to write, why they needed to write this specific story. So there are certain people who say to themselves, I'm gonna make $150,000 this year, and. And I'm going to do it by writing genre fiction. I don't care about any internal movements. I'm going to put spaceships on the COVID and I'm going to deliver a really great story as best as I can that complies with all of the conventions of the genre, and I'm going to throw in everything but the Kitchen sink, book after book after book. And hopefully I will get a big enough genre audience that I can make $150,000 a year. Now, that's okay with me, but you shouldn't confuse what that is with something that you're trying to do. If you wanted to make $150,000 a year writing, you would not be on this podcast with me because you haven't made a penny in 16 weeks.

So that's not your motivation. So people who really get locked into the settings of science fiction and the lit RPG and they just want to write a genre book, they're not tacking on these other, you know, weights around their neck so they don't have a problem starting their book in the middle of the fantasy world and having people ratchet up and get higher and higher in a level. And, you know, there were years ago that I represented a book that was just. It was. I don't represent the writer anymore. And he's sort of a famous director. He wrote this incredible lit RPG book 10 years before the genre even evolved. And everybody, when I was representing the book, sending it around to all the major publishing houses and every single major publishing house said, this is really good, but I don't know what it is. I'd really like to publish it, but I'm not going to offer. So what happened was nobody offered on the book, but I think if it went out now, people would go, oh my gosh, this is ready player one. So sometimes you can be ahead of the curve. And unfortunately for, for that guy who's doing fine, I'm sure he was ahead of the curve and he was disappointed. But if he came out with that book now, the lit RPG people would go crazy for. And, you know, if he's listening, he can send me an email and I'll help him do it.

Okay, that, I mean, that answers my question about, you know, getting all worked up about the lit RPG thing. And the biggest thing is like, I need to hit the marks on my content genre because that's what, what really drives a story more than anything else.

Well, the other thing, Tim and I, you know, Steve Pressfield and I have faced this in our career together. When he writes a novel, what I'll just say to him is like, hey, Steve, you need another, let's see, you need another action sequence in the war arena and, you know, make it like, give me, give us like another 3 or 4000 word great sequence of events that's action driven. And that way he complies with the conventions and obligatory Scenes and he adds on extra stuff, but that's not the central focus of his storytelling. And I can say that to him. And he'll go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. And he doesn't get all bogged down worrying that he missed something. He'll go, oh, yeah, I forgot that scene. I'll fix that.

I see. Because it's like you said, I need to have three different tests in my middle build where she gets progressively harder and harder and more dangerous.

Yes. That's the convention of lit rpg.

Okay.

It has to ratchet up. There has to be, you know, certain levels. It has to have levels of difficulty.

So I want to change the subject a little bit because every year my wife and I, Candace and I have these movies we watch, like kind of the same Christmas movie. So like every Thanksgiving night we watch the kids go to bed and we watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Like, that's every Thanksgiving. So we have like these movies we watch. And so this weekend was.

That's a convention of a love story, by the way, that the lovers have rituals, but go ahead.

Oh, so we're on a good path.

Yeah, you are.

Hopefully it's not a tragic love story.

No, no.

So this weekend we watched the Family man, the Nick Cage movie with Tea Leone or whatever. Where? Did you ever see this movie?

No, but I think I remember. It's like he wakes up, it's like Groundhog Day or something.

So what happens is like the very beginning of the movie. Okay. The movie's been out 15 years, so, you know, if you haven't seen it, now I'm gonna spoil it. So it starts with this scene of like, they're in college and he's going to London to do this internship. And she like, does this whole speech where she's like, I want you to stay. Don't go. If you go, I'm afraid we'll never see each other again. You know, I love you and I choose us. I want you to stay. And he's like, no, I'm going to go. But that doesn't change anything. I'm going to come home. But sure enough, it fast forwards and he's this big time super successful investment banker and he has like, you know, all the trap, you know, everything he could ever want, success wise. Except, you know, he never got married, you know, never had kids, all that kind of thing. But he's like, he's fine. He's like, I got every. And in fact, there's this point where he meets. They never really Say, but it's like, you know, an angel or something who's played by Don Cheadle. Is that his name? Yeah.

Yeah.

He's great. I love him. Yeah. Who's just. I wish he was in almost every movie. He's just amazing. And Don Cheadle is like, basically, like, well, what do you need? And he's like, I don't need anything. And he goes, I want you to know you did this to yourself. And he's like, what are you talking about? He's like, I just want you to know. And so the next. So he goes to bed that night, it's Christmas Eve. He wakes up the next morning, and he's in bed with Te Leoni, and he's got two kids. And, you know, it's this whole thing of, like, he wakes up in the world of what would have been. Have been like, if he had not got on that plane.

Right?

And it was so neat to watch it with everything I've learned about story and looking at, like, that video that kind of, like, solidified some things in my head that we talked about a few weeks ago, because there's, like. I mean, it's a really, you know, obvious world change, right? So he, like, goes to sleep in one world, wakes up in the next. So very obvious there. And then he spends the next 25% of the movie just fighting to get out of this world, right? Like, I don't want to be here. And he does all these different things. And then right at the midpoint of the movie, he flips over and realizes this is good, you know, and completely changes his attitude. But then he keeps making mistakes, right? So what he tries to do is recreate the old world inside of the new world, you know? And then he learns, like, you already have everything you want in this new world. Don't try to recreate the. You know, it's like this whole perfect arc.

And.

And then, sure enough, at the end of the middle build, he goes to sleep and wakes up and he's back in the original world, but now he's completely changed. And it was just like, because, you know, I like the movie, and it's good, and there's, like, really funny moments in it, and it's all the normal things that you would think would be in this kind of a movie. But, like, watching it with these new eyes has just been like, man, they hit every mark at the exact same time.

And blue.

Like, I realize it now because I've been studying this, but, like, I've been watching that movie every Year for years. And I was never like, oh, they're hitting the conventions, you know, they're hitting, you know, like it just is still. I still get surprised by how I guess formulaic something could be. And it's still just really good. And you don't feel like it's formulaic. I don't know.

Charles Dickens wrote that story in the 1800s. It was called A Christmas Carol.

That is indicative of stories come from the culture. They don't necessarily come from, you know, innovative writers. So what's interesting is that certain stories have they become very popular at very specific times in the cultural movement. So the collective unconscious of, you know, the popular culture is something that none of us can anticipate. But the Family man, yeah, the way you were describing that, that was the Ebenezer Scrooge story. And they cut a couple of ghosts. And they didn't make it as strictly metaphysical as they did back then, but instead they used the redemption plot, which is the modern day controlling idea for modern sort of redemption stories is that the lead character pursues money or sex or anything that's very, you know, carnal. Yeah, stuff like that. And they do it with such a vengeance. And then they have to have a revelation, a worldview change where they come to the realization that that stuff is not going to save them. And then they redeem themselves by rejecting that worldview and changing themselves. So the family man is obviously in that tradition of story, and it's indicative of the way our modern world is, is that everybody is pulled between their work life and their home life. So a great redemption story that plays on that conflict in all of us is pretty much going to work. You know, people are going to have an emotional reaction no matter what they say. If everybody in our audience goes and rents the Family man and watches it, even though they know what's going to happen, they're going to have an emotional response to it. Because the conflict in all of us is so deep between, you know, if I spend another five hours at the office, I might be able to make an extra ten grand this year, which means I can get a better car and reduce our credit card debt. But if I do spend that extra four hours, I'm not going to be able to help out with the kids play and what do you do, you know, like, which is more important. And a lot of times you say to yourself, I've got to get that credit card debt down.

But everybody knows deep down that's the wrong choice. Everybody, single person, deep down, knows when you choose to worry and obsess about intangible things like credit card debt. That's not to say that you should get it over, you know, work, being with your family and all that positive and negative energy. At the same time, you're not making the right decision. And this is all sort of in our DNA. We deep down know that the only thing we have to say for ourselves on this planet are the relationships that we have with the people, the other people on it. And that no matter, you know, how many Trump Towers you have, you're still not going to be all that engaged with the world. You're not going to live a fruitful life if all you care about are cars and jets and things like that. And it's a very, you know, that's cliche to say it, but when you do it in a story that is very clear and crystal to the audience, they will have the emotional response and it will make them feel good because it will say, yes, that is something I value, too. I value the time I spend with my family. And, you know, it's okay that I don't have a brand new car because I don't care about that. That's not important. So that's why it's nice that you and your wife have that tradition, because what you're doing is reaffirming what you both cherish. And you're saying, hey, this, I value this too, and so do you. And isn't this fun to watch Christmas vacation, too?

Yeah. You know the other thing I've been noticing, well, one thing is I was always afraid. So I have these buddies that make films and I've always wondered, like, do the films lose the magic once you know how they're made? Like, the whole, like, I don't want to know how the sausage is made thing, right? Because then sausage will suddenly lose its magic. And so I wonder, like, I've wondered about, like, our stories going to lose their magic as I understand how they're made. And it's been neat to watch them. And I'm finding, especially rewatching anything I've watched before, like, I'm catching these things that are really interesting. So one of the things I. Because you talk about how your job is to innovate on a convention, right? So you've got to tell this textbook story, like Family Man. It's been told over and over, but you've got to innovate it so it's not just cliche. And so as I've watched movies and shows, I've realized my favorite moments Whether it's a comedy or a drama or whatever are the moments when I thought I knew where it was going. And it does the opposite.

Right.

Like the mentor character and family man is his like 4 year old daughter, you know?

Right.

And there's like these two great scenes because you have this whole question of like, should he have sex with her? Because, like, she's his wife. Not really. You know, he's from this other world. And so there's like this scene where they're about to have sex and then they don't. And then you're like. Then they do it again and you're like, okay, this is the one. They're going to have sex and sure enough, they don't again. And then they do it at the perfect time, right when he. That's when he finally flips over. And then I might have mentioned this before, but there's this episode of the Office where Dwight makes. Everybody thinks there's a fire. And so like everybody's scrambling and he had locked all the doors to lock them in.

And so everybody's freaking out, trying to get out. They're like breaking windows, trying to break down doors. And then they show catch Kevin, who's like this like really obese guy. And the whole joke through the show is like, he eats, you know, tons of M&M's and he's like super unhealthy and he's really overweight. And they flash to him and he. Where they just showed somebody trying to throw something through a window and they showed somebody else like ramming something into a door, trying to knock it down. Then they show him pick up a chair and throw it into the vending machine to break the glass. And he's like pulling out all the, the like potato chips and like putting them in his pocket. And it was like so unexpected in.

Character, but completely in character. Right, right.

Like, and you always say like, inevitable but.

But surprising.

Yeah, yeah, surprising, but inevitable, you know, so like completely surprised, but then you're like, well, Kevin wouldn't be doing anything else except that during a fire, you know. And so it's been really fun as I watch these movies and again, ones that I already know and then I'm watching them again over the past probably six months that I've actually started understanding what the hell's going on and notice that like all of my favorite scenes are when I'm like tracking like, they're gonna do this, they're gonna do this. And then, oh my gosh, it's completely out of left field. But it's, like, perfect for what the movie should have been. So, again, I don't know where I'm going with that other than, like, just. It's been fun to start to notice these things and, you know, some of my favorite, you know, movies and books and. And stories so well.

The other way to apply that knowledge is to just start writing down the solutions to the problems that your favorite movies come up with. What do I mean by that? Write down the big revelatory moments that you witness. What was it? What active thing was the thing that made the character make the choice that they made. This really works well in terms of thrillers and crime stories, is that if you pick out the scenes, how did they solve the villain's speech Convention? Who delivers the villain's speech and the village speech in a thriller is when the bad guy explains the world to you, and they explain it in a way that makes sense. The speech in praise of the villain. You know, in movies like, let's see, what's a great thriller that has a great speech in praise of the villain? In the Silence of the Lambs, you know, they talk about how Buffalo Bill is, you know, getting rid of his victims and how he's doing it and how ingenious it is and how it's impossible to track him and all of these things. And every time they try and get close, he gets further and further away from them. And there are moments like that throughout thrillers. And there's also the hero at the mercy of the villain scene, writing down how other people solve that problem. And what you're also going to find is when people just bail on the problem altogether and they just do some cliche and you're like, oh, wow, that was bad. I can't believe that didn't bother me before. But when you have a list of how the masters solve these problems in innovative ways, then when you get stuck on something and you say, well, how am I going to get this guy to change his worldview from being all into money and being happy into money to. To recognizing that having a family and children is more important than that. So the filmmakers said to themselves, well, what's the one thing that everybody recognizes as even being more pleasurable than money and having a deeper meaning than money? Oh, it's sex. It's sexual intimacy. So if we can use sex between him and the love of his life that he's returned to as the thing that once he does reach that place and they do, you know, have sex, it will change him, and that will change his worldview because he will then discover that all the other things that he thought were important were meaningless. And so that choice they had to think through, that they had to say to themselves, well, maybe the little kid might get hit by a car and he rushes and saves her and maybe that's what changes his worldview. And somebody said that might not be. That's a little bit playing off of the danger in the child. It's exploiting the child. This isn't really an action story. This is about intimacy. This is about somebody who's alone, who can't find a connection with somebody. The big moment has to be when that person has a connection with somebody else. In Steve's the Knowledge, there was a moment when he gave me his draft and I said, you know, there's got to be something. And he writes about this a couple of weeks ago in one of his posts. There's a moment when sort of the mentor figure has to save the mentee. And if she isn't the one who saves the mentee and somebody else does, it wouldn't be as suck at the heartstrings like it should. So learning from the masters and finding your favorite movies and finding out how those people solve the problems. So if you're writing a thriller, rent a bunch of thrillers that are you're like, chinatown's a great thriller. The Fugitive is a great thriller. Use those as your beacons to come up with your own fresh ideas and to innovate and see how those people do it so that you know when you face the same problems, you'll be inspired.

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